I know a lot of online weight loss spaces are against eating back your exercise calories - for good reason. If you’re guesstimating your exercise calories, you’re probably going to overeat if you eat them back.
That said, when I started losing weight (35 pounds down in 6 months) I read something along the lines of “the person who eats the most and still loses weight, wins.” This stuck with me. Why starve unnecessarily?
As a short person, my TDEE is only about 1800 calories on a standard day. To lose a pound a week, I would have to cut down to 1300 calories! And then even lower as I lost weight! This is obviously not impossible (props to those of you who are doing it) but it wasn’t sustainable for me.
Instead, I purchased a Fitbit and decided to experiment with eating back the exercise calories it gives me. I don’t log any extra exercise, I just eat back what it automatically detects. I log my food in the app and follow the recommended daily calories that fluctuate based on my activity for that day. I heeded the warning that fitbits overestimate calories burned by a lot so I tried it out for 2 weeks, weighing every day and carefully weighing all my food. Guess what? After 2 weeks of eating back my calories I had lost 2.3 pounds!
For me, Fitbit is pretty much bang on the money. It has been a lifesaver for me, getting to eat back extra calories. If I’m super active, I know I can eat more and if I’m still hungry at the end of the day, I can add in a bit more activity to get more calories.
Keep in mind that ymmv especially depending on what sort of activity you do. My main source of activity is brisk walking and Fitbit seems to calculate my calories burned from that almost perfectly. If you are going to start eating back exercise calories, monitor things for a few weeks to ensure you’re still losing the expected amount of weight. If you’re not losing weight or losing less than expected, you’re probably eating too many of those calories back and your Fitbit/Apple Watch/online calculator could be inaccurate.
That said, Fitbit gets a bad reputation and I don’t think it’s totally fair. It can be an awesome tool to make your weight loss more predictable, to allow you to eat more, and to allow you to change up your food habits based on the activity you did that day. Even if yours doesn’t calculate your calories that well, you can always test it out for a few weeks and then adjust your deficit or eat back 75% of the estimated calories to still get huge value out of it. Once you know how much it’s overestimating by, it’s easy to just correct for that and still eat back some calories.
Super underrated for us short people! I’m convinced that if you’re able bodied, there’s no reason to torture yourself on ~1200 calories unless you prefer it. Get active and you’ll benefit twice! Once from increased activity and once from a more flexible diet!
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